Now You Just Need to do Something About That Butt

Memoir Series

Content Warning: Emotional, psychological, and energetic abuse, alcoholism, misogyny, and fat shaming.

I was twenty-one, standing in my father’s dining room, and feeling pretty good about myself until those words fell out of his mouth. I’d lost weight. Again. A constant yo-yo since I was eight and was sent to Weight Watchers until we were asked to leave a few meetings in due to the adult women there feeling uncomfortable sharing what they needed to share with a child present. I remember walking into my third-grade classroom and flashing the number of pounds I had lost on my fingers to my teacher back then.

In sixth grade, I was an office girl. We got to hang out in the front part of the principal’s office with the secretary and be her assistant, me and two other sixth graders, during lunch. This gave the secretary time off to have her lunch and we got to eat lunch in the office.

The secretary pulled me aside one day and told me my mother had called and asked if I was eating more than she had packed in my lunch. She did not say it, but I could tell she was appalled that my mother would have done this. I read it all over her face and in her energy. It was maybe the first time I considered the idea that how fat I was perhaps was not my fault.

My mother’s boyfriend had been around for over a year at this point and the abuse from him was beginning to escalate.

To say they were obsessed, both of them, my mother and my father, with my body and how much weight I did or did not carry is an understatement. By the time I was fourteen, I had lost the ability to recognize the feeling of hunger, due to the many diets I had been put on.

I knew my father was fat, there was no denying it. It has been a lifelong battle for him, him against his body and I was the reflection he could not stand.

I did not recognize that my mother also carried extra weight because she only projected her issues about her body onto me. It was always about me. So if we all went on a diet in our home, my mother, my sister, and I, it was for me, just for me, never about the rolls of fat that comprised her belly.

Health was of no concern, just pounds and scales and calories.

We were fed a lot of sugar when we were very young. Sugar addiction and alcoholism often go hand in hand, and our mother was a sugar junkie. She loved the hard candies, a ball of sugar sitting in her mouth, slowly dissolving. We never drank water for meals. It was always milk followed by a sugary soda or powdered drink. Ugh, the 70s, *shivers*

The first time I went to the dentist at the age of seven I had thirteen cavities. Two rounds of sitting beneath the drill, seven filled the first time and six the next. The health of my teeth is still an issue for me, as they are for both of my parents and going to the dentist is always traumatic no matter how much healing I do.

The idea that I am genetically prone to carry extra weight was not something I was allowed to entertain or even understand. The idea that one calorie in my body operates the same as multiple calories in other people’s bodies, well, that just did not matter. I was fat, and it was my fault at 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, into infinity. There was no compassion, understanding, or love for me, the fat girl, at home, only blame and shaming. The grief I carried would come out of me at times in long sobs, no one cared and no one understood.

Of course, it was not just my parents who interacted with me in this way, it was almost everyone, from extended family to the kids at school even to some of my friends. I was bullied and ridiculed and name-called, and again, there was nowhere safe. No one ever said to me, “Gosh, it’s gotta be painful being the fat girl.”

And it was. Constantly. And at times, no matter how comfortable with myself I have become, it still is.

“Fat girls can’t wear ruffles,” my paternal grandmother said while we were shopping for dresses at the mall when I was eleven. She’d take me back to her apartment and feed me frozen Snickers bars from the freezer. She was also fat.

“My how you’ve grown and grown and grown and grown,” my grandfather with a distended belly said when I was twelve when visiting him for the first time in a year.

“Dad, that’s enough,” my mother cut him off. He’d be dead one year later from esophageal varices a complication of cirrhosis. Told by his doctors to either quit drinking or die, he chose death, or at least the alcoholism and the entities along with it that had inhabited his body did. He bled almost to death and ended up on a ventilator which was unplugged once my mother arrived in Cleveland. Thirty years later on our first Christmas in this house, a neighbor across the street would die of the same.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” my aunt asked me when I was thirteen. I was in Cleveland with my dad. My sister had stayed back in Illinois with our mom as she did not want her to have to be alone on Thanksgiving. Divorce is hell.

“A singer and an actress,” I confidently said.

“That is unless the fat rises and swallows your vocal cords,” said my father, laughing.

His older sister smacked him as I ran out of the living room crying. I could hear her yelling at him to apologize from my cousin’s bed where I was hiding under the covers.

“You look like you’re six months pregnant!” my mother to me at seventeen. I had been on our high school stage for something, leaning against the wall and arching my back. This was her feedback afterward as I floated off, looking for her approval, the disgust in her voice still ringing through my cells.

How I continued to get on stage, audition, get in front of the camera, and be public facing in all of the ways I have and do, I don’t know. I guess I am relying on the aspect of me that knows myself to be more than this fat body.

“Look at all the Noras!” my physics teacher crowed as a screenful of cows appeared in the film he was showing during class that same year I was seventeen. My suicidal ideation was still a recent memory after the wreckage that had occurred on the heels of my stepfather’s ouster from our home. Laughter from almost everyone ensued at my teacher’s meanness, including me. I laughed along with it all for far too long.

A few years ago I had a visit from a high school friend who was in that class with me. While sitting with him, his wife (also from our high school), and their kids, the memory surfaced, and I asked him if he remembered it.

“Not only do I remember it,” he said, “I use it as an example of what never to do.” He worked with teachers then, conducting workshops and other ongoing education programs for them. That he would remember it and then use it for constructive purposes was healing for me, healing that he knew the wrongness of it himself at seventeen and continued to know the wrongness of it now.

When I was twenty-three my car broke down, as in a cracked engine block, unusable. I was waitressing and working at Victoria’s Secret and acting with the Imagination Theater Company and financially was broken as well. I steeled myself for the inevitable battle and called my father to ask for help.

“You know, if you weren’t overweight you would not be in this situation. You’d already be making good money as an actress and would not need my help,” was his reply as he denied my request for help.

The rage that came out of me was epic in proportion. I let him know that if he ever referenced my weight or my body again in any way he and I would be done, as in finished, as in goodbye to the daughter he never wanted in the first place.

After Jon and I met, I experienced some spontaneous weight loss, common when I am feeling happy, accepted, and loved. It’s also common when I am deeply grieving. Radical emotions in me typically result in rapid weight loss, no matter the feelings.

“When I saw that dress on the hanger I thought no way was that going to fit you, it’s too straight up and down,” my mother said while I was wearing it when we were visiting her in Cleveland a few months into me being the smallest I had been in some time. Even then, she just could not help herself. Obsessed. I was thirty-three.

As was typical, over the next few years the pounds began to once again accumulate on my frame, quitting smoking at thirty-five accelerated this and by thirty-seven, I was back to wearing xls and plus sizes.

My sister and I took our father out to dinner for his birthday. It was April of 2004. Jon did not come as he was dealing with some stuff with his mother and also just had a bad feeling about it. More than once he’d already stepped into my father regarding his behavior with both me and my sister, and he was pretty much at his limit.

My sister and I bought him some expensive gifts and took him to a nice restaurant and did all of the things we knew would make him happy. He drank martinis and ate Italian food and opened his gifts and acted like an eight-year-old, which is pretty much where he is stuck, like our mother.

“Where’s Jon?” he asked.

“He’s got some stuff going on with his mother and was not up for being here,” I replied.

The next day the phone in the apartment on Oakley Ave rang. We’d been living there almost a year and had recently decided that we’d be moving to California in the fall. “Is Jon there?” my dad asked.

Surprised I said, “Sure,” and handed the phone off to him as Jon took it in the other room. I thought my dad was calling to thank me for the night before or to check in on Jon after the crap that had played out between him and his mother. That I thought this may be why my father was calling shows how still deeply in denial I was even then as to who he truly was.

About twenty minutes later Jon came out of his studio, and I asked him what my father wanted to talk about. He was cagey and made up some bullshit on the spot and I knew he was hiding something. This went on for a few hours until, while taking a nap he got in bed with me and put his arms around me. I threw them off of me demanding to know what it was my father had said. I could tell it was not good and that Jon was clearly in a state of discomfort. It was coming off of him in waves.

“He said,” Jon began, “Nora is more obese than I have ever seen her…………”

“Wait, WHAT???!!!” I shouted, cutting him off. Violated.

It got worse, “It must be getting hard in the bedroom right now,” my father had said to my partner of five years. His “genius” plan was that he wanted to use Jon to trick me into going to a nutritionist to put me on a diet. “Of course, I’ll pay for it,” he said.

“That motherfucker!” I shouted.

I think this is the moment when my interest in sex began to die. It’s been a long slow death, one that would play out over many years, but this was the origins, of this I am certain. While not a physical sexual assault on me, this was an energetic sexual assault and abuse by my father and it was not the first time. I’d been dealing with this kind of energy directly from him since I had hit puberty and had been witnessing him direct it at other women long before then.

His hatred and fear of women is profound, and to be honest, I am astounded that I have ever been able to have any kind of healthy interactions with men at all. (I mean, have I? Really? I don’t know.)

I stormed over to the phone, a continuous stream of expletives emitting from my mouth. I had warned him fourteen years earlier that if he ever in any way brought my weight up to me again he and I would be finished. His phone went to voicemail, and I left him a message that pretty much said the same.

I ended it with a, “Do not ever call me!” and slammed down the phone, a visceral action most of us can no longer take because now hanging up on someone happens with a simple tap.

He called me at 1:00 am, once he’d gotten home from a night of gambling, yelling back into my voicemail, making himself somehow a victim in this situation, per usual, trying to blame Jon because he had told him not to tell me. But I was done. In that moment I had no interest in hearing his excuses or ever being in his physical presence again.

I have seen him once since then. In 2018, fourteen years after that night, I took a trip to the suburbs of Chicago to visit him in the hospital where he lay almost dying. I’d reestablished minimal phone and email contact with him some years earlier, after realizing I was no longer feeling relieved that I did not have to interact with him and instead was using my energy to hold him away.

Jon and I were at the beach with the dogs one afternoon when he said, “I had a dream about your father last night.”

A long conversation ensued, should I or shouldn’t I try to contact him? Jon’s dream indicated that my father was in between this world and the next. So, I tried. No answer on his home phone or his mobile. I called my cousin who lives not far from him in Illinois, yes he’d almost died a couple of weeks ago. She thought then that perhaps he still would. I tracked him down and got him on the phone from his hospital bed. He did not sound good.

No one had called me or my sister. It was up to Jon and his clairvoyance to get the information to us.

My sister and I talked, and I decided to get on a plane. I let my father know I’d be coming.

“Don’t touch me,” were the first words out of his mouth when I walked into the room he’d been in for almost a month. There for C. diff, a bacterial infection, largely harmless to anyone healthy, he had been in very bad shape. C. diff happened after the kidney infection that had left him incapacitated on the floor of his townhome for twenty-four hours. He’d been getting up to change the battery on his Life Alert which had died when he passed out. The police and ambulance arrived the next day after Life Alert was unable to contact him.

Although on the surface his “don’t touch me” was a warning about the bacteria, it was probably one of the most honest things he’s ever said to me.

After three days of listening to him talk only about himself it was time to get back on a plane. While I was saying goodbye I said, “I am going to hug you now.” I put my arms around him while his hung there frozen at his sides, unable to return my affection.

He did not die in 2018. He lives today, a forty-minute drive from the apartment on Oakley Ave. I have not told him we are returning. I have not told him anything, in fact, about our need to move or anything of any substance about my life.

He’ll be turning 91 soon.

I guess this is a to-be-continued piece.

P.S. I have not felt the need to say this here before, but for this one I do. My intention here is to share. I am not looking for advice or suggestions. Thank you as always for your love and support.

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